Deep value, contrarian, and Grahamite investment

Conference Call Transcripts

Barel Karsan’s Saj Karsan has created a useful new website called conferencecalltranscripts.org that scours the internet for conference call transcripts and makes them available by company or ticker symbol. Says Saj:

If you’re like me, you find the info divulged on company earnings conference calls to be of great value. At the same time, though, you find most of the call to be a complete waste of time. (e.g. A lot of time is wasted practically reading out what has already been issued in a press release.)

Conference call transcripts, on the other hand, let you speed-through the agonizing legal disclaimers, the repeated sections of the press release, and the answers to questions in which you had no interest. Switching to transcripts from the audio calls themselves could increase your productivity by saving you about 45 minutes per call, especially if you’ve taken my speed-reading tips to heart.

A problem I’ve found with transcripts, however, is that there is no single location where you can find them all, until now. There are some sites that publish a bunch of transcripts, like Seeking Alpha, Morningstar and Thompson, whereas others have to be googled to be found. Some companies (e.g. Kirkland’s, Dorel) even provide their own. Some sources are free, whereas others charge big money. So to find a company’s transcript at the price you’re looking for, you have to check all of these sites, google around, and check company pages. If you’re looking on earnings day itself, you may have to perform the necessary steps multiple times per day if you’re waiting for the transcript to become available, which eats into your productivity gains!